Last week I participated in a service design experience during the two-day Belgian edition of the Government Jam Antwerp at the House of Innovation. This initiative from Peel, Talking Heads and Cronos Public Services was supported by public services all over the world. They were eager to prove that innovation and efficiency are more than buzzwords to them (See #Ggovjam and #GGovjamAntwerp). With this blog I would like to create enthusiasm, so you want to dive into it yourself. Because that is what it really takes. I read some ebooks and some papers on Service Design but none of them can teach you what I learned last week. So, here goes.
Re-vitalize Your Brain
Humans are creatures of habit and if no one asks you to change, most of you will just continue doing what you were doing. This is evidently not helpful to stimulate innovation and creativity. A simple Energizer-game Imaginary ball was all it took to re-vitalize my brain. During this game, you are forced to be creative, nowhere to hide, time to step out of the comfort zone. Doing this in a playful way is very supportive. Amazing how resourceful anyone can be. The game ended suddenly, when someone ate our huge, sticky, smelly ball (fortunately, it was a virtual one).
Freedom of Association
Next up, the theme of this edition of the Government Jam was announced: “keyhole”. We made some groups and had to note down on post-its everything we associated with that theme. This service design technique is called the Lotus Blossom. Clustering the associations around the central theme brought out the participants’ very different notions (a key to open a door vs. a key to lock a door). This in turn, empowers you to see things from a new perspective and to benefit from the freedom of association.
Prioritization Takes Five Minutes of Courage
All the sticky notes are a bit like our world today, where we are overwhelmed with information. So which ideas were really important? In my group of 4, we each received 6 votes to give to the ideas we prefered. The ones with the most votes, moved up the list, the ones without votes were trashed. Prioritizing, which seemed a big hurdle to take in the beginning, only took us 5 minutes of courage.
Don't Wait. Go Test your Concept. Now!
If your service was a product in a box, what would it look like, what would be the name of the product, how could you sell it to anyone,… those were some of the tricky questions that fired up the debate. Unfortunately, we only had limited time. “Stop talking, start doing”, was the advice we got from the professionals. And indeed we came up with a box. The next step was to go out on the street and to gather feedback. Do respondents understand/like the concept or will they kill our baby? After our first interview, we simplified our script and got the ball rolling. We collected a wealth of information that kept us busy the next hours and even the next day.
Pitch it
One of the big problems of good ideas is that they are doomed to remain just that, an idea. Actionable ideas make the difference. Therefore we were asked to prepare a (business) case to present our idea to an independent jury. Suddenly we felt the pressure of competition, the need for secrecy, and the teams started making wild plans to impress the members of the jury.
No Fun, No Creativity
The most important guideline we got from the start was to have fun. And I sure did. A good indication was my feeling that it was all over way too soon. During those two days, I witnessed a lot of laughter; strangers at the start, participants quickly felt at ease around each other. Do not underestimate the importance of the environment to open up and to finally stimulate creativity. Our House of Innovation was the perfect harbour.
How do you feel now? I hope you would like some jammin’ too?
By Filip Berten
